Re: books with the subject of dark and light dualism
The Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), and Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tsu), would be a good start. Nothing's going to get as specific as you want it to be, i.e. everything about light and shadow or darkness or whatever, but Daoism, those are the two major texts, will hit on duality a lot. For example, here's chapter 3 of the Dao De Jing, Robert Henricks translator.
"1. By not elevating the worthy, you bring it about that people will not compete.
2. By not valuing goods that are hard to obtain, you bring it about that people will not act like thieves.
3. By not displaying the desirable you bring it about that people will not be confused.
4. Therefore, in the government of the Sage:
5. He empties their minds,
6. An fills their bellies.
7. Weakens their ambition,
8. And strengthens their bones.
9. He constantly causes the people to be without knowledge and without desires.
10. If he can bring it about that those with knowledge simply do not dare to act,
11. Then there is nothing that will not be in order."
This is more political rather than mystical/spiritual, though you could certainly interpret it that way. Laozi's point is that one thing brings about another, e.g. if everybody's pretty much on the same level, nobody needs to steal. But if somebody has something that's valuable and somebody else wants it, well there you go. Here's part of Ch. 2.
"1. When everyone in the world knows the beautiful as beautiful, ugliness comes into being;
2. When everyone knows the good, then the not good comes to be.
3. The mutual production of being and nonbeing,
4. The mutual completion of difficult and easy,
5. The mutual formation of long and short,
6. The mutual filling of high and low,
7. The mutual harmony of tone and voice,
8. The mutual following of front and back—
9. These are all constants."
Again, the point here is that these things are mutually productive. In order to say something is beautiful, there must be a "not beautiful", i.e. ugly, for them to be different from. You can't have one without the other. You might check out the articles on Laozi and zhuangzi in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy.
Translations of these texts should be available online. Oh also, the Yijing, I Ching, if you want a divination system based on duality to study. There's also a lot of duality in other systems, but I don't know that there's a general resource on it. Also I think you need to be careful not to boil everything down to a duality, i.e. one thing or the other.
Sorry I didn't answer the question about Buddhism. That requires thought and I'm too tired to go do research at the moment. If you're still interested and I haven't gotten back to you on it, post here and I'll see it eventually. Offhand though, Buddhism isn't really concerned about light and whatever, the two big things would be attachment and nonattachment or ignorance and what usually gets translated as enlightenment. But it really doesn't have much to do with light. It's kind of complicated really.
Very briefly, Hinduism tends to be essentialist, in other words, only a thing that has its own essence, is itself in and of itself, is real. Buddhism says that's not true, look for a self and you won't find it. But thinking the self is real leads to all kinds of problems. So getting that view, and there are a *lot* of different schools of thought on how to do it and what it means to have it, is what frees you from those problems, and that's what Buddhism is trying to do. According to some schools even calling it a view is wrong and you should get to the point where you've abandoned views. I did say it was complicated.
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